Bostrenus--The Zaherany--The Headlands--Main
characteristics, inaccessibility, picturesqueness,
productiveness.

Phoenicé, or Phoenicia, was the name originally given by the Greeks--and
afterwards adopted from them by the Romans--to the coast region of the
Mediterranean, where it faces the west between the thirty-second and the
thirty-sixth parallels. Here, it would seem, in their early voyagings,
the Pre-Homeric Greeks first came upon a land where the palm-tree was
not only indigenous, but formed a leading and striking characteristic,
everywhere along the low sandy shore lifting its tuft of feathery
leaves into the bright blue sky, high above the undergrowth of fig, and
pomegranate, and alive. Hence they called the tract Phoenicia, or "the
Land of Palms;" and the people who inhabited it the Phoenicians, or "the
Palm-tree people."

The term was from the first applied with a good deal of vagueness. It
was probably originally given to the region opposite Cyprus, from Gabala
in the north--now Jebili--to Antaradus (Tortosa) and Marathus (Amrith)
towards the south, where the palm-tree was first seen growing in rich
abundance. The palm is the numismatic emblem of Aradus,[11] and though
not now very frequent in the region which Strabo calls "the Aradian
coast-tract,"[12] must anciently have been among its chief ornaments. As
the Grecian knowledge of the coast extended southward, and a richer and
still richer growth of the palm was continually noticed, almost every
town and every village being embosomed in a circle of palm groves, the
name extended itself until it reached as far south at any rate as Gaza,
or (according to some) as Rhinocolura and the Torrens Ægypti. Northward
the name seems never to have passed beyond Cape Posideium (Possidi) at
the foot of Mount Casius, the tract between this and the range of Taurus